Physics professor recognised in Australia Day honours, now working on lasers and lightweight solar cells, says science education is critical for the country’s futureChennupati Jagadish, a physics professor and neurotechnologist, was not aware he had been nominated for a companion of the order of Australia (AC) when he received a letter telling him he would receive it on Australia Day.“When I received the letter I felt very humbled, grateful and honoured,” he says. Continue reading...

Philanthropists Maria Myers and Susan Alberti, scientists Chennupati Jagadish and Mary O’Kane, and paediatrician Robert Ouvrier receive highest honourEminent women in engineering, philanthropy and sport were among those to be recognised with the highest accolade in the 2016 Australia Day honours. However, women comprised just 183 of the 604 Australians to receive honours.Among those to receive admission as companions of the Order of Australia (AC), were the philanthropist Maria Myers, the vice president of the Western Bulldogs AFL club, Susan Alberti, and the engineer and scientist Mary O’Kane.

Why is everyone so excited about the latest news from space? There’s more than enough to worry about on planet Earth alreadyLots of news from outer space last week. Somewhere at the back end of the solar system, a huge, icy new planet is lurking, behind Pluto, which, according to the panic merchants, may come crashing by around the end of April – yes, this coming April – and wipe us out. Worse still, we are filling space with a gazillion bits of debris and satellites, which will eventually start colliding, until one day, said Nasa employee Donald Kessler, back in 1978, anything that we send up there will be “sandblasted into smithereens”.What is so thrilling and romantic about space travel and exploration? I am bored stiff with it, and fairly terrified, and what good does it do me if there’s another planet out there? I am stuck on this one. Soon there are going to be squabbles about whose space junk smacked into whose satellite/spaceship/chunk of outrageously expensive equipment at 30,000mph; was it an accidental bit of whirling crap, or did the Russians/Chinese/Americans do it on purpose? Then it will be armed conflict and the third world/space war, as if we didn’t have enough trouble down here already, with our relatively small wars, displaced millions, nuclear risks, mishaps and general wreckage. Continue reading...

New calculations shows there is just a 0.01% chance that recent run of global heat records could have happened due to natural climate variationsThe world’s run of record-breaking hottest years is extremely unlikely to have happened without the global warming caused by human activities, according to new calculations.Thirteen of the 15 hottest years in the 150-year-long record occurred between 2000-14 and the researchers found there is a just a 0.01% chance that this happened due to natural variations in the planet’s climate. Continue reading...

Editors of the Mail, Express, Times, Sun and Telegraph should put the interests of their readers first by reporting the real facts about global warmingWhy are so many British newspaper editors still serving up unscientific climate change denial to their readers, even though the governments of more than 190 countries - including the UK - agreed in Paris last month that urgent action is required to avoid dangerous impacts from rising greenhouse gas levels?

The process of scientific discovery is far from mysterious, even if it is often more convoluted than you might imagine“A virus,” wrote the celebrated immunologist Peter Medawar, “is a piece of bad news wrapped in protein.”The bad news from norovirus, one of the main preoccupations of my research group, is that you will soon be scuttling to the toilet for two days of misery. Its other name – winter vomiting bug – doesn’t do this tiny pathogen justice because, as well as throwing up, you will have to endure a prolonged dose of diaorrhea. Continue reading...

The Wellcome Collection’s new exhibition States of Mind uses science and art to unravel mysteries from memory loss to sleepwalkingOn a crumpled sheet of tin foil in the Wellcome Collection’s conservation studio lies an odd assortment of plasticine forms. One looks suspiciously like the footprint of a chicken, another like a deformed pot, while a large, red lump bears more than a passing resemblance to a gammon joint. But the comparisons are hopelessly wide of the mark. For these are, in fact, part of a determined effort by a great scientist to explore one of the most curious facets of being: consciousness. Yet while Francis Crick revealed the hidden secrets of DNA through a model, his attempts at applying similar techniques to neuroanatomy in an exploration of our inner sense of “self” were less successful. “We brought a couple of neuroscientists in to look at them and bafflement was the result of that encounter too,” admits Emily Sargent, curator of the Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition States of Mind: Tracing the Edges of Consciousness. Nevertheless Crick’s wide-ranging work in the field was influential, not least in breaking the taboo of tackling the topic in scientific circles.Although Crick was pivotal in bringing the study of consciousness into the scientific arena, he wasn’t the only one to be captivated by its mysteries. From Descartes on the separation of mind and body to modern musings on whether consciousness is an illusion, many have struggled to tease the phenomenon apart. Yet progress is being made. “I think we understand a lot more about what makes us conscious and what we are conscious of, but we still don’t really know how consciousness happens at the deepest levels of explanation,” says the exhibition’s scientific adviser, Professor Anil Seth. “It is still a bit of a mystery.” Continue reading...

There are only two ways the human body can deal with the invading pathogens and infections that can cause colds and other illnesses – and neither involves vitamins or ‘superfoods’ that claim to offer protectionWalk through the aisles of any health food shop and you’ll see pots of echinacea or zinc that promise to “support your immune system” or “maintain its healthy function”. Read new age health blogging sites and you’ll find posts on how drinking hot lemon water or knocking back a shot of wheatgrass juice or the current green goo du jour will “boost your immune system” and make you less likely to get ill. These are tempting prospects at this time of year, but ones that are foiled by an inconvenient truth: they don’t work. The idea that any dietary supplement can boost your immunity makes very little scientific sense. And because of the way your immune system works, even if they did what they say they did, you definitely wouldn’t want them to.“People have this idea that the immune system is some kind of internal force field that can be boosted or patched up,” says Charles Bangham, a professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Imperial College London. “This couldn’t be further from the truth. As the name suggests it’s not a single thing but a system incorporating many organs and biological functions.” Continue reading...

Measure your behavioural inhibition system to find out if you avoid things that are boring, painful, new and scaryWe can measure a key aspect of your personality with just seven questions. Please rate the following on a scale from 1 (very false) to 4 (very true):1) If something bad is about to happen, I’m usually afraid or nervous.

Poor results can wreck people’s lives, but the thinking behind exams is crude and simply out of dateWhen I was in high school I took the ACT, a college aptitude exam used as an admissions criterion by most American universities. My score was in the lowest third of all students. That was painful enough but, adding insult to injury, the ACT score report informed me that, based on my score, my expected probability of succeeding at my hometown college, the University of Utah, was around 15%. As I remember it, my chance of success at my dream school of Harvard University was less than 3%.I felt pretty hopeless about my future. After all, these stark percentages were endowed with the sober authority of mathematics. Before I took the exam, I had thought that one day I might become a scientist or neurologist, but no – what a silly fantasy that was. Continue reading...

Pilot study investigates why parents choose not to vaccinate and why many do not to disclose that their children aren’t immunised, potentially putting others at riskThe health of pregnant women and their babies is at risk from parents who refuse to disclose that their children have not been vaccinated, according to researchers in Western Australia who have launched a pilot study to investigate the motivations of anti-vaccinators.Dr Bronwyn Harman, a families researcher with Edith Cowan University’s school of psychology and social science in Western Australia, said unvaccinated children could be carrying diseases such as rubella and whooping cough that are dangerous to pregnant women and newborns. Continue reading...

New South Wales hospitals and universities are conducting secret surgical experiments using government funding, media reports allegeSydney hospitals and universities are conducting secret medical experiments on hundreds of primates, according to media reports.Related: Scientists told to stop wasting animal lives Continue reading...

Secrecy and the Conservative governmentThe country simply cannot go on like this over the question of official secrecy. The fundamental problem is easy to spell out: because the present administration of Mrs Thatcher tries to make everything secret, there is no national consensus over what should properly be kept secret and what the public has a right to know. The Government, aware it is going against the grain of public and press opinion, uses erratic tactics, depending on what it thinks it can get away with: ranging from the prison cell under the Official Secrets Act for the hapless – and harmless – Miss Sarah Tisdall, to wretched dithering over the forceful, left-wing journalist Duncan Campbell and his well-advertised plans last week to expose the Zircon satellite project.Meanwhile basic civil liberties go by the board. The BBC is leant on behind the scenes; the High Court is asked to grant injunctions against MPs. The Prime Minister herself set a very bad example to us all by conniving at the leak of a classified letter by her own law officer during the Westland affair. Continue reading...

Wearing safety equipment boosts appetite for danger, even in unrelated activities, a study has foundPerhaps safety helmets should carry a health warning. Wearing them, it appears, encourages dangerous risk-taking. In an extraordinary study, Dr Tim Gamble and Dr Ian Walker, from the University of Bath’s department of psychology, have shown that wearing a helmet is likely to increase sensation-seeking and make people less safe – even in situations where headgear is not required.The academics believe that their findings, published in the journal Psychological Science, call into question the effectiveness of safety advice, notably about the wearing of helmets for leisure activities such as cycling. But they also suggest that their conclusions help shed light on far wider issues, such as decision-making in conflict zones. Continue reading...

Committee also attacks failure to allow vital diagnostic test to be released in west AfricaBritain’s response to the Ebola emergency, which claimed more than 11,000 lives in west Africa between 2014 and 2015, was inadequate and flawed, MPs will reveal on Monday.The House of Commons science and technology committee will publish a report on the lessons to be learned by the UK from the way it responded following the outbreak. Continue reading...

It’s the relaxation technique of choice, popular with employers and even the NHS. But some have found it can have unexpected effectsI am sitting in a circle in a grey, corporate room with 10 housing association employees – administrators, security guards, cleaners – eyes darting about nervously. We are asked to eat a sandwich in silence. To think about every taste and texture, every chewing motion and bite. Far from being relaxed, I feel excruciatingly uncomfortable and begin to wonder if my jaw is malfunctioning. I’m here to write about a new mindfulness initiative, and since I’ve never to my knowledge had any mental health issues and usually thrive under stress, I anticipate a straightforward, if awkward, experience.Then comes the meditation. We’re told to close our eyes and think about our bodies in relation to the chair, the floor, the room: how each limb touches the arms, the back, the legs of the seat, while breathing slowly. But there’s one small catch: I can’t breathe. No matter how fast, slow, deep or shallow my breaths are, it feels as though my lungs are sealed. My instincts tell me to run, but I can’t move my arms or legs. I feel a rising panic and worry that I might pass out, my mind racing. Then we’re told to open our eyes and the feeling dissipates. I look around. No one else appears to have felt they were facing imminent death. What just happened? Continue reading...

Using spaced repetition as a study technique is effective because you are deliberately hacking the way your brain works

Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly, who marked his 300th day aboard the International Space Station on 21 January, displays another fascinating feature of life in microgravity by playing ping pong with a water droplet. Kelly explains that the hydrophobic paddles repel water and allow him to move the ball of water back and forth Continue reading...

For some birds, feeding at waste sites seems preferable to long migrations to warmer climates, but researchers warn of risks to ecosystems and healthIt ranks as one of the more uncomfortable impacts that humans have on wildlife. Massive rubbish dumps and sprawling landfills have led some birds to give up on migration. Instead of flying thousands of miles in search of food, they make the waste sites their winter feeding grounds.Researchers in Germany used miniature GPS tags to track the migrations of 70 white storks from different sites across Europe and Asia during the first five months of their lives. While many birds travelled along well-known routes to warmer climates, others stopped short and spent the winter on landfills, feeding on food waste, and the multitudes of insects that thrive on the dumps.

Fragments of spent rockets and other debris orbiting the Earth pose ‘special political danger’ of damage to satellites being misconstrued as attackThe steady rise in space junk that is floating around the planet could provoke a political row and even armed conflict, according to scientists, who warn that even tiny pieces of debris have enough energy to damage or destroy military satellites.Researchers said fragments of spent rockets and other hurtling hardware posed a “special political danger” because of the difficulty in confirming that an operational satellite had been struck by flying debris and had not fallen victim to an intentional attack by another nation.

Chtonobdella tanae named after the Joy Luck Club author because of her longstanding support for the American Museum of Natural History, joining a host of wildlife, asteroids and dinosaurs named after authorsAmy Tan is happy. Not because of booming sales or critical acclaim, but because the author of books including The Bonesetter’s Daughter and The Joy Luck Club has just had a species of leech named after her.Chtonobdella tanae is a tiny Australian leech, and is, said the researchers announcing its name, “the first new species of invertebrate without chitinous or calcified tissues (like a shell or exoskeleton) to be described with computed tomography (CT) scanning”. Continue reading...

The new discovery may be 10 times the size of our Earth, but surely our own home is still the most planety thing in the solar system. Let’s not put ourselves downWhen great discoveries are made about the universe, journalists always hope scientific experts will use language everyone can understand. A new, ninth planet in the solar system has been discovered: it’s 10 times the size of Earth and takes between 10,000 and 20,000 years to orbit the sun – and astronomers at the California Institute of Technology have startled the world by announcing that it is “the most planety planet of the solar system”.Whoa! Bold statement, guys. It reminds me of when, in my second year at university, I experimented with smoking a joint, and rashly claimed to be looking at “the most door-handley door handle ever”. Continue reading...

Himalayan forest thrush’s distinctive, musical song sounds like ‘Adele’ compared to the similar-looking Alpine thrush’s rasping ‘Rod Stewart’, say researchersAn exceptionally secretive thrush’s distinctive song has helped scientists identify it as a new bird species.The Himalayan forest thrush, which lives in north-eastern India and China, was given away by its song which is richer and more musical than the similar-looking Alpine thrush’s rasping, grating, scratchy voice.

He will be 90 in May, but David Attenborough has no intention of retiring – his latest film, about the world’s biggest dinosaurs, is broadcast this weekend, and his excitement and concern about the natural world remain undimmedYou cannot meet David Attenborough without reflecting on the lottery of life. He bounces into the room unaccompanied, a little stiff in the lower back perhaps, but otherwise breezy and lithe. He is sound in wind and limb, vision and hearing, his eyes sparkle, his face is scarcely rumpled by time. Yet in three months he will celebrate his 90th birthday.While other people’s worlds tend to shrink with age, his seems to expand. His curiousity ranges as widely as ever. His ability to understand and assimilate new information seems unabated. “Oh, I forget things,” he claims. When I press him for examples, he tells me, “Well, where I put my glasses – I had them about three minutes ago and they have simply evaporated, they’ve dematerialised. Oh yeah, and I forget engagements.” Continue reading...

Sir David Attenborough tells George Monbiot that the British public is better informed about the environment than ever before, in part thanks to television. He discusses his new programme on the titanosaur – a subset of dinosaurs that can reach 37m in length. He also talks about Monbiot’s proposal for ‘rewilding’, and says that despite nearing 90 he has no plans to retire

We look at the innovations that are changing the NHS today and asks what science on the horizon will transform the health service in the next decadeIt employs 1.6 million people, spends more than £4,000 a second, and performed 10m operations last year in England alone. Millions more visit emergency units, have outpatient care, and receive help for mental health problems. This week we’re focusing on the NHS and how science and technology underpin the care doctors can give to patients.Ian Sample talks to Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, NHS England’s Medical Director and professional lead for NHS doctors. Bruce is responsible for promoting clinical leadership, quality and innovation, having previously been a surgeon and physician who specialised in cardiac surgery.

A privately operated reusable spaceplane based on a Russian cold war design has been chosen by Nasa to fly at least six re-supply missions to the International Space Station (ISS). The Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Dream Chaser will launch on a rocket but land on a runway like the space shuttle.Nasa currently use Boeing’s ATK Cygnus module and Space-X’s Dragon capsule to re-supply the ISS. While Cygnus is designed to burn up on re-entry, carrying rubbish for disposal, Dragon splashes down for retrieval and re-use. Continue reading...

In the era of the smartphone, London cabbies are going to keep committing every last alley to memory. It might seem pointless, but we gain insight as well as information by exercising the memoryThe Knowledge has been saved, for now. Despite the fact that a smartphone can get you around London with very little skill required, licensed taxi drivers will still have to spend years learning streets by heart. This can seem like an absurd luddite fantasy, of a piece with the cabbies’ resistance to any less-guild-like competition, from the likes of Uber.What’s not to like about outsourcing to technology the tedious facts that clutter our brains? We now use calculators for mental arithmetic, Wikipedia instead of libraries, and – most fundamentally – we read the written word instead of memorising epic poetry. Who could object to such progress? Socrates, for one. He would have detested Wikipedia. In a passage of unsurpassed irony, Plato wrote into the Phaedrus Socrates’s objection to the written word: that it allowed people to parrot facts without understanding and assimilating them. He even put in a word for the poor texts themselves, helpless to defend themselves against misunderstanding when the author was not there to clarify. Continue reading...

The oil billionaire’s departure was cheered by climate scientists who have campaigned for the natural history museum to cut ties with fossil fuel companiesThe oil billionaire David Koch has stepped down from the board at the American Museum of Natural History, after 23 years and more than $20m in donations to the New York museum.Related: Dark Money review: Nazi oil, the Koch brothers and a rightwing revolution Continue reading...

Any mention of flat-Earthers brings out the insults – and historical blundersAn article on this site yesterday on modern “flat-Earthers” gained plenty of interest. Most of the comments joined in with general hilarity about the gob-smacking stupidity of other people. The existence of (several) flat-Earth societies is certainly fascinating, but I was also slightly gobsmacked by the comparison drawn between those who today believe the Earth is flat and “Galileo’s 17th century critics”.I mean, really? Are there really people out there who believe that Galileo showed that the Earth was round and that his critics denounced this view, “outraged by his heresy”? Especially people who like to laugh at others for getting their facts wrong. Are they stupid or something? Continue reading...

From Calvin Klein to Y-3, astronauts are currently all the rage on planet FashionWhen Tim Peake’s spacesuit curtailed his spacewalk this month, because of fears that it might spring a leak, designers – the fashion, not the Nasa kind – were no doubt itching to have a go at making him a new one. Blame it on Peake or David Bowie’s Starman, but space – the final frontier – is on fashion’s radar once again. Continue reading...

Computer simulations show the mystery planet, if it exists, would orbit about 20 times farther away from the sun than Earth, according to astronomers with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Nicknamed Planet Nine, it moves on an extremely elongated orbit and takes 10,000 to 20,000 years to swing once around the sun. Caltech researchers say the planet would be about 10 times bigger than Earth. The planet is so large that with sensitive enough telescopes astronomers should be able to see it crossing the night sky Continue reading...

Deke Arndt of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says 2015 was the warmest year since records began and climate trends have severe implications for 2016. Human-made global warming and a boost from El Niño have contributed, say scientists. Data released on Wednesday by Britain’s Met Office shows the average global temperature in 2015 was 0.75C higher than the long-term average between 1961 and 1990, much higher than the 0.57C in 2014, which itself was a record. The Met Office also expects 2016 to set a new record, meaning global temperature records will have been broken for three years running Continue reading...

Brazil’s health officials say the jump in cases of microcephaly is linked to mosquito-borne disease, and the best prevention is to remove stagnant waterThe suspected number of cases of microcephaly, a rare brain defect in babies, has continued to rise in Brazil, reaching 3,893 since authorities began investigating the surge in October, according to health ministry officials.Fewer than 150 cases of microcephaly were seen in the country in all of 2014. Brazil’s health officials say they’re convinced the jump is linked to a sudden outbreak of the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne disease similar to dengue, though the mechanics of how the virus might affect babies remain murky. Continue reading...

Astronomers investigating the odd alignment of rocks beyond Pluto have concluded that an undetected icy planet four times the size of Earth must existAs science often does, it began with a “huh?” Some distant objects far beyond Pluto were behaving very oddly. The orbits of a handful of space rocks had aligned for no apparent reason. Though stumped at first, astronomers now have an explanation: a huge ninth planet at the edge of the solar system.If the researchers have their sums right, the mysterious new world is 10 times more massive than Earth and up to four times the size. Nicknamed Planet Nine, it moves on an extremely elongated orbit, and takes a staggering 10,000 to 20,000 years to swing once around the sun. Continue reading...

Named Dracoraptor hanigani, meaning ‘dragon robber’, the dog-sized meat-eating predator is ‘the best dinosaur fossil Wales has ever had’It died nearby on a prehistoric island, was washed out to sea, and became encased in a cliff face near the Glamorganshire Golf Club.The small, meat-eating dinosaur, the first from the Jurassic to be found in Wales, was discovered in 2014 by local amateurs, who spotted its bones amid the debris of a recent rock fall.

Researchers say remains of 27 murdered tribespeople in Kenya prove attacks were normal part of hunter-gatherer relationsSome 10,000 years ago a woman in the last stages of pregnancy met a terrible death, trussed like a captive animal and dumped into shallow water at the edge of a Kenyan lagoon. She died with at least 27 members of her tribe, all equally brutally murdered, in the earliest evidence of warfare between stone age hunter-gatherers.The fossilised remains of the victims, still lying where they fell, preserved in the sediment of a marshy pool that dried up thousands of years ago, were found by a team of scientists from Cambridge University. Continue reading...

YouTube videos and spiffy websites espouse the conspiracy theory – but is the movement doomed to once again fall flat over countless schisms?YouTube user TigerDan925 shocked his 26,000 followers recently by conceding a shocking point: Antarctica is a continent. It’s not, as he previously thought, an ice wall that encircles the flat disc of land and water we call earth.For most of us, that’s not news. But TigerDan925’s followers, like Galileo’s 17th century critics, are outraged by his heresy. Welcome to the contentious universe of flat-Earthers – people who believe the notion of a globe-shaped world orbiting the sun is a myth. Continue reading...

Study of fairy story origins traces some back thousands of years, with one tale dating back as far as bronze ageFairy stories such as Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin can be traced back thousands of years to prehistoric times, with one tale originating from the bronze age, academics have revealed.Using techniques normally employed by biologists, they studied common links between 275 Indo-European fairy tales from around the world and found some have roots that are far older than previously known, and “long before the emergence of the literary record”. Continue reading...